Soaring

by Bill Nikolai

He was taking a chance in making this trip, ironic for a man used to thinking of consequences and the payment for actions gone awry. Accustomed to wearing a slate suit on his weekday sorties amongst the insurance companies around Hibiya and Shinjuku, on this early Tokyo morning he found himself in faded jeans and heavyweight sweater, toting a snowboard and all the outerwear and overnight gear necessary to manage a two-day trip to the mountains. He had considered doing the excursion on the weekend but knew he didn't have the gaman -- the endurance, the patience -- to battle the thousands of Japanese who would travel all night Friday in order to careen around each other for a few frenetic hours. Smith's odds of surviving with life and limbs intact were immeasurably better if he ventured onto the slopes mid-week. Some of the risk came in the fact that at 45 he was long in the tooth but short on snowboarding experience; actuarial tables showed that the injury rate for boarders who took up the sport after age 40 approached 100 percent.

The real risk, however, was in being discovered to be a man with skewed priorities. Work from Monday to Friday -- and in many cases Saturday -- was the norm in most of Japan. To shirk duty and responsibility and do something crazy like snowboard in the middle of the week was unthinkable. This made it all the more attractive to Smith who was increasingly tired of toiling with the drones in their grey hives at their gunmetal desks. He would fly like an eagle, at least for a couple of days.

Of course, such an erratic choice was at odds with a business which counted on predictability. If circumstance and occurrence could be reliably anticipated by company actuaries, there was money to be made as long as consumers feared the worst. Take life insurance, for example: the firms were wagering you would live a long and fruitful span whereas consumers were betting there was a good chance they would expire at the most inopportune time. Fortunately for the companies, the Japanese were a largely predictable lot, both in their behavior and worry about life. Through prudent living they had achieved unparalleled longevity, yet they spent more on insurance than people in any other country. The language was rife with expressions about the fragility of life, comparing it to "the morning dew" -- asa tsuyu -- or a "light before the wind" -- fuzen no tomoshibi, yet more oldtimers were living into the triple digits than ever before. Japan's oldest twins, Kin Narita and Gin Kanie -- affectionately known as Kin-san and Gin-san -- had become TV stars in their nineties before finally leaving this realm at ages 107 and 108 respectively.

The very men who counted on the consistently ordinary and -- for the most part -- safe lifestyle of regular Japanese were themselves creatures of banal habit. At least, these were the conclusions that Smith was coming to as he left Tokyo behind. An hour or so out of Ueno station, as the red express train forsook the stubbly rice fields at the edge of the Kanto Plain and began to climb gradually into the foothills of central Honshu, Smith thought about what had brought him to this country. His firm, Grand Assurance International, was neither Grand nor International but was anxious to live up to its ambitious name. The lucrative Japanese insurance market had been well-insulated from foreign competition until legislative reforms a few years ago had finally forced the industry to creak open the door a crack. Smith had been sent to get a feel for local business practices and -- more importantly -- to gain an understanding of the risk factors affecting mortality, injury and property loss. Of course, much statistical information was freely available on the Internet and elsewhere. A quick search revealed that the chances of meeting an untimely end in a car were 50% greater in America than in Japan and the odds of having your ticker stop were four times as high. Homicide was almost ten-fold more prevalent on Smith's side of the Pacific.

It was the local information that would help complete the picture and for a year now, Smith had been busy consuming English language newspapers. He watched television news, listening to the translations on the TV sub-channel, spoke with business colleagues and anyone else who could converse with him, and he observed.